Flying South

by Martin Delany

  I had found it hard to understand a man who could write about his own life yet exclude any mention of his daughter who had just died. Later my own marriage broke down in disarray much to the distress of my parents. My father, in particular, took its failure hard and scolded me for bringing pain and suffering to others. I too had started to write poetry and in the working out of my emotions on paper I came to understand that my father desperately clung to the idea of a never changing world but when change came he could walk away from the causes and never refer to them again. I moved back to my parents’ house and the slow disintegration of their marriage gathered pace.

  It is now ten o’clock, a time when my father would have wished the television tuned to boxing. My mother would gather up her magazines and retreat to her bedroom where she would turn up her television as loud as possible to annoy him and cause him, because of his deafness, not to hear the boxing commentator. Coming into their house late in the evening I would encounter two blaring televisions and an otherwise total silence. There I could feel the icy atmosphere and my heart went out to both of them as they lived a daily grinding lie and pretended all was well. When she finally left he initially insisted on staying on his own. He continued his writing but the passion seemed to be gone. I secretly read his work and showed him my poetry. When I did he would, with a hint of sarcasm in his voice, say it must be great to have a talent for writing. He rarely talked about my mother except to comment negatively when he saw photographs of her and her partner at the various social functions they frenetically attended. From the time he moved in with me he became very morose, unwilling to get out of bed, all interest in life apparently gone. Over the last five years he has alienated his few remaining friends and his life has reduced down to a litany of current ailments. He uses medical language like he wrote poetry. It trips off his tongue in an unending cacophony of words.

  The clock beats relentlessly on. It is now almost eleven o’clock and the doctor has just told me there is nothing more he can do. I see him to the door returning quickly to my vigil. The end is fast approaching for this passionate, cranky, withdrawn man and I am left to ponder (for I never had the nerve to confront him) on the real man behind the mask, the false life and the hidden words. I know from the doctor that there may be a final sigh, perhaps a throat rattle and I will see the colour race down his face. I look at the clock. It is eleven fifteen. I settle down to wait.

  KING OF KINGS

  THERE IT IS AGAIN—the same corner, the same turning into the strong wind whistling down the darkened avenue at the top of which stand two burly menacing figures, monkey arms extending to thickened knees. Am I awake feeling the dread steal over me or could I with a sense of relief open my eyes and realise I am dreaming this awful scene again? ‘Go on! Open them’ I say to myself, ‘See the room, the flowery curtains fluttering in the breeze from the half closed window. Call the loyal guards on sentry duty outside.’ I initially feel the rush of relief but it is quickly followed by a gnawing uncertainty of what it all means. What is happening to me? My eyelashes seemed glued together! I am being sucked back into my dream again as the men move towards me.

  The nightmare continues. On the other side of the avenue I can see the city in flames across the bay. Have I had something to do with this or am I fleeing as a refugee from the fire storm? Who are the men looking for? Perhaps they are volunteers helping the populace leave the burning city in an orderly manner. Another glance around the corner dispels the notion of finding any charity from these muscle bound thugs. They are moving slowly towards me their powerful flashlights sweeping first one and then the other side of the avenue. They will not capture me I repeat to myself, they will not capture me, the mantra gathering strength as adrenalin courses through my body. I will survive this moment as I have survived it in the past. I push my body against the steel gate that has always yielded to me and it opens noiselessly. Slipping inside I manage to close it just as the torch lights linger on the other side and then pass on.

  This is the moment, as in the past, when I wake up trembling with fear, my night clothes wet with sweat and my brain still digesting the final words of the two men. ‘He is here somewhere. There will be hell to pay if we don’t find and silence him permanently.’ I have analysed these words many times and cannot identify the source of the threat. Those I have feared I have killed together with their extended families. Others rot in jail with no hope of release, their families already adopted by my favoured generals, the children comfortable with their new fathers and mothers. I control the young males by directing their education and ensure females are not permitted to attend schools. Religion is state organised and I am now officially God-King of Kings. Why there is really no need to worry about anything! I control everything!

  Calm now I switch on the bedroom light and lie idly watching the moths rush at the bulb, banging themselves against the thin glass playing Icarus in their hurry to claim the brightness. Here is a new morbid omen-have I too been flying too close to the Sun, looking for and accepting greatness? Have the spirits of those whom I have killed, as I clawed my way to the top, now come seeking revenge? Do they want to silence me permanently and win the accolade of having rid the world, as they would see it, of one more despot? But wait! I should not think like this. There are no spirits except for those I have myself canonised and all have been old comrades in the initial struggle for independence from the Great Powers. I have killed the families of these men. Must I now worry about my own family when I have had, until now, no reason to doubt their loyalty? Yet some of my forty six sons will, after my death, lose out in a future struggle for power. Perhaps they are impatient and seek to seize the throne now?

  ‘Guards’ I shout ‘Guards! Arrest my sons together with their children and their mothers. Do it quick now before first light. Prepare the council chamber and summon the judges. My family are traitors and will be tried for treason this day.’ I lie back now more relaxed. I mean to have them all found guilty and shot by nightfall. My government will have to prepare the necessary admissions regarding the great plot against the People now fortuitously discovered by their Leader and how Foreign Powers have intrigued to cause chaos in our peaceful land. As I drift off to sleep I remember some of the fine phrases we have used before in situations such as this and my last waking thought is to consult the archives as soon as I wake up.

  LAKE COMO

  THE BOAT LEAVES EVERY THIRTY MINUTES travelling the fortysix kilometres to the end of the lake. It pulls out quickly, latecomers running from the Piazza Cavour not wanting to take the hydrofoil, only eighty minutes to Colico but a large part of a week’s salary. Routing by Cernobbio, Torno, Moltrasio and Urio brings one into the middle lake and with half the journey gone Bellagio appears, the Versailles of Italy, the summer home of Pliny the Younger, ripening gardens cascading down to the shore.

  A group of tourists, flint faced maidens from the New World, ask me to point out Versace’s and George Clooney’s villas. Weary from the heat and suffocating humidity I tell them of Pliny’s letter of two thousand years ago, written to a friend, concerning the woman who threw herself and her husband from the terrace of their villa. Her husband, suffering from an ulcer in those parts that modesty conceals, allowed her to examine him and give him an honest opinion of whether it was curable. She saw it, gave up hope, and tying herself to her husband she plunged with him into the lake.

  As I finish the story of Pliny the boat rocks gently against the harbour wall. Quickly the wooden gangplank is pulled on board and my erstwhile friends disembark grim faced to resume their search for more Old World culture.

  LATE AFTERNOON,

  ANNESTOWN STRAND

  THE HORIZON SEEMED WRONG to me at first. The waves raged and fell too far out, too high, too angry for the four fishermen happily hauling their currach through the sand and away from the calm water at the shore. The waves were painted the same height as the headland that ran along one side of the bay and to me they were almost touching the Sun as it started its
descent behind the cliffs. What strange fishermen they were! -goblin boots and hats turned up at the front like ladies at a parade ring-no fish in sight, none on the shore, none I thought in the boat as I stood, a child, on tippy toes trying to see into it. The artist, anticipating such a search, had painted the boat reclining slightly to its side with its front buried in a groove etched out by the fishermen as they pulled it through the damp sand. Nothing of the inside could be seen.

  The four fishermen were my uncles painted one bright summer day in their early twenties on Annestown beach -the fishing village where they were brought up and to where my uncle Tom was to return as a retired Royal Air-force Pilot. He founded and coached an under twenty-one ladies soccer team, no mean feat in a county devoted to hurling. His sheer stubbornness and enthusiasm ensured that the football team enjoyed much success until Tom succumbed to lung cancer at the age of sixty five. The others are gone too. Harry, in his thirties, painting a US Navy destroyer in San Francisco Bay, fell and was crushed by the ship drifting lazily against the pier wall. Sean with his University degree, a first in the family, could not find a job in the Ireland of the 1940’s. Thirty years as a machine operator in Manchester robbed him of any intellectual stimulus and he took his own life at the age of fifty five. Uncle Michael, of the four, survived the longest, dying at seventy seven, of a heart attack one summer afternoon as he sat contented on the cliff looking down at the beach where he, with his brothers, had hauled in that currach so many years before. The seagulls were screeching overhead, diving into the plume of smoke rising from his pipe, as he opened the first of his daily ration of three pint bottles of stout which hung out of the pockets of the threadbare brown suit he wore for more than forty years. He had just said to me ‘Will you have a drop?’ when he sighed, slumped to his right, his pipe falling on the grass and the opened bottle of stout flowing slowly down the front of the old suit, the ultimate indignity of dying; his wife of fifty years soon to unravel the mystery of why he went with bulging pockets to the cliffs every day.

  The painting Late afternoon Annestown Strand was given to my father by Mary, Michael’s widow. It had been commissioned by my grandfather as four of his five sons (my father was a late arrival being some twelve years younger than Harry the next youngest) scattered from the home to make their way in the world. The artist was already well known in the late nineteen thirties and by the time my father acquired it all large paintings by the same artist were achieving very high prices in London and Dublin auction rooms.

  To my delight my father commissioned the same artist to add a small feature to the original. The change was minimal and to an outsider would not be apparent. High on the cliff top the artist placed Michael. A small blob on the landscape, a change in colour from the green grass represented him with his pipe and bottles of stout gazing solemnly down on the scene below, his eyes following the line of the beach until it disappeared around the eastern headland.

  Shortly before my father’s death he gave me the painting as a gift. It hung proudly in the hall of my house and gave me repeated pleasure as I returned tired from work in the evening, or tipsy from a late night, I sought out the solitary, contented figure of Michael, high above the beach. I watched him watching himself, as a young man, posing in what he thought was the embodiment of a rugged fisherman home from the sea. The painting was a source of much conversation and reminiscence when I or one of my children would ask visitors ‘Do you notice anything different about this painting?’ and before they could politely answer no I would be off on a history of my family and the two roles that Michael played distanced only by time and the liberal imagination of my father.

  In the court proceedings I fought hard to keep it but my exwife, knowing the market value, instructed her barrister to ensure that she was awarded the painting as part of a final settlement. She subsequently sent it to London to be auctioned and I could only watch in sorrow and dismay as part of my family’s history was bought by an investor from the United States. The painting is now included in a permanent display in a small university town in the state of Rhode Island. The university has been well endowed by the investor and has a fascinating collection of paintings, drawings and correspondence of the artist including a copy of his acknowledgement of my grandfather’s commissioning of Late afternoon Annestown Strand. I have been twice to see the exhibition and have achieved a certain celebrity status in the area when I explained to the college my connection to the painting.

  Standing in a sun filled corridor, filled with glorious landscapes by the artist, I have asked visitors to the college ‘Do you notice anything different about this painting?’ and before they would answer I would recite once again a history of my family, Annestown Strand and village, my grandfather’s five sons all now gone, the travels of the painting, the visitor backing away in puzzlement or fear as my eyes water and I think again of those I loved.

  THE MUSIC AND THE FALL

  THEN THE MUSIC SEEPED OUT the door into the chilly night and hung around my head like a bad hat I knew I would have to go into the club. Her perfume had the same effect on me for years; cause me to turn suddenly in a crowd, searching in vain for her as the scent slid past my nostrils and clung fleetingly to my clothes. Once inside, across the darkened room I could make out through the smoke and gloom a group playing on a small stage. In front of the band a large crowd moved and waved their hands to the music. These were, close in, kids mostly, and I was struck how they seemed to recognise the piece and how it had the same strange hypnotic hold on them as it did so many years ago for me.

  Moving nearer to the stage and feeling the lyrical tug at my emotions, I suddenly saw her, or someone very like her, in front of me, her body swaying to the music, her head and blonde hair moving in that way I knew too well. It had to be her! All my senses came alive, my very being tingled with anticipation. She had her back turned and I could watch from a distance and appreciate the still tight bottom, straining against the cloth of her jeans, at the top of which I could see the outline of a white thong. I had dreamed about this day, knowing it would come eventually, played out scenarios in my head, tested and probed my resolve not to fall to pieces in front of her, to remain in control of myself and not drown again in her. A pull, a flickering of the stomach muscles, like that of a smoker yearning for a cigarette after a good meal, drew me on until I was directly behind her-her perfume rising and enveloping my head in a heavy, sensual, erotic fog. It was her! Fifteen years of misery stole away without a backward glance or warning. I was snared once more, knowing one turn of her head towards me would melt my remaining resolve and I would be putty in the hands of this beautiful, dangerous woman who had done so much to destroy my life.

  VAN MORRISON AND ME

  IT IS 1965 and I am fifteen. I am standing outside my father’s study (in reality a small room off the dining room where he keeps the household bills, his father’s music sheets and his great aunt’s diary all stuffed into a small mahogany ‘bureau’). My mother is restraining me – I am angry. The old brown sportscoat of my brother, three years older than me, has finally died -the sleeves now riding half way up my arms, the leather patches, sown on more than once with loving care, hang by a thread no longer able to find a grip, a secure hold in the arm of the coat. My mother is anxious. She has to tell my father that the once loved garment cannot be handed down to my younger brother and he, my father, will now need to provide for two new ones for our home stays.

  I am angry because in being allowed out for the first timeto the local dance hall (a band from Belfast called “Them” are playing, the lead singer is Van Morrison) my father has insisted that I wear a lounge suit. He is distracted, distant, not at all interested when I tell him I do not have a lounge suit. Clothes for his children have been up to now a matter for my mother – a task she has performed with some acumen as the boarding school requirement of white shirt, grey trousers, blue blazer, blue tie and black laced shoes has made it easy for her to pass everything down the line; new when worn by my older brother
, rapidly fading, tearing and hanging on my expanding body until finally falling to pieces on my younger brother.

  It is Easter. There is a whole world outside my door and I have only ten days to explore it before being boarded up for another term. I want to meet girls. I will be expected to boast once back in boarding school and I need to know what I am boasting about. I am now past the age of being allowed to bluff with my peers. But I have never tried to chat up a girl. I do not know what to say to them. I am shy, conscious of my burgeoning height, now over six feet, not yet matched by any proportionate increase in weight. “A long string of misery” my older brother calls me.

  All the local boys I knew at primary school are ‘with it’. They talk to girls everyday after school, their hair is growing long and they listen to Radio Luxembourg. Some of them, it is rumoured, have gone all the way with certain girls who are known to ‘give out’ and I desperately need to catch up. I cannot fall behind my friends. Now my only non school clothes have finally given up the ghost. It is two o’clock -plenty of time to go into town and buy something fashionable. But my mother is stopping me entering the study. She tells me not to disturb or make any demands on my father. She tells me something about money worries. The bank has demanded repayment of a loan. I don’t understand what she is saying. I turn to go, my face burning red. Silently I am cursing my parents. They together with the threadbare sportscoat have conspired to ruin my first night out.

  It is now nine o’clock. I am lurking behind the pillars beside the dance floor. ‘Them’ have not arrived yet. Music is playing through the sound system. It’s a slow number -a ladies choice is announced. I look away from the girls across the hall feigning indifference. One of them with perfectly straight long blonde hair is suddenly beside me asking to dance. We move on to the floor. I hold her as I have practiced with the school dance instructress. Lowering my head I am entranced and transported away by the smell of her perfume and hair shampoo. This moment I know will stay with me for the rest of my life. Then the voice of a dead priest, warning of impure thoughts and actions, pounds through my head. Throwing caution to the wind I move closer and give myself to the moment.